Fox’s eye pests me these days. The TikTok, Youtube and Instagram algorithms do a good job of pushing up makeup tutorials with Caucasian models looking up to make them appear tilted. I’m more than pissed off.
The eye pops trigger flashbacks on my experiences in elementary school when my classmates made so-called “exotic Ching Chong eyes”, pulling the outer corners of their eyes to mimic the size and shape of Asian eyes. My peers were so engaged that they even developed a whole taxonomy of ethnic subgroups: eyes pulled up for Japanese, sideways for Chinese, and down for Korean.
The fox eye trend of putting on makeup, pulling on your face, or having plastic surgery to make the eyes and eyebrows appear tilted upward, is a shameless cultural appropriation. Caucasian women like actress Megan Fox and model Bella Hadid are often credited with popularizing the trend. These models of Western beauty standards require special effort to achieve this look. On them, this “fabricated” eye shape looks beautiful. Among Asians, however, this innate eye shape is a feature to be scoffed at. Whether the look is achieved with makeup, eyelids or plastic surgery, the effect is the same: it is always an age-old provocation.
I once stood up and told my classmates that the gesture was racist, only to be shot with “jeez this is just a joke, can’t you even take a joke?” From then on, all I did to defend myself was laugh; I wanted to be a “cool person” who knew how to joke. Each morning I used my hands to bring the corners of my eyes closer together, hoping that one day they would become round. Each time I took a photo, I scrutinized how my eyes looked wider than everyone else’s. My Asian-American identity was reduced to a single facial feature.
Recently, digital content creator Emma Chamberlain posted a photo to Instagram where she used her hands to back and tilt her eyes and stuck out her tongue in a sassy gesture of indifference. Chamberlain sat on the post for about two days in the midst of a storm of criticism, particularly from the Asian community. Still, fans from other walks of life defended her, arguing that the gesture was part of a harmless makeup trend with no evil intent. They say members of the Asian community have “overreacted” and “been overly sensitive.”
Much like the way I apparently “overreacted” when I “couldn’t take a joke” from my peers.
Chamberlain later apologized but did not address the real issue of the heavy gesture, simply saying, “Sorry for those who have been hurt.” Essentially, “sorry YOU were offended.” Such a no-excuse turns to those elementary school taunts of “why are you so sensitive?”
What Chamberlain and others who perform this gesture do not understand, however, is that the gesture has a racial historical weight. Consider the French political caricature of Henri Meyer, “China – The cake of kings … and emperors,” a satirical depiction of imperialism in the late 1890s. The cartoon depicts Chinese and Japanese world leaders with features mirroring those included in the fox eye trend: winged, elongated, angled eyes with eyebrows pushed upwards. The caricature pokes fun at Asian traits that aimed to make the Chinese more barbaric and subhuman to justify imperialism and to make the Japanese appear distanced and isolated from other European powers. Yet in the 21st century, these Asian characteristics suddenly turned into beauty trends for non-Asians.
Unfortunately, the longstanding style of bullying people with these characteristics has even led individuals to seek permanent change. In 2013, American television personality Julie Chen revealed that she had undergone plastic surgery to make her natural Asian eyes appear larger and therefore more accessible to her audience. Before that, according to the directors and the agents, her eyes made her seem inattentive and witty. And Chen is not the only one to have eye surgery. Asian blepharoplasty, an eye surgery popularized in the mid-twentieth century to make Asians look nicer and more trustworthy to westernized society, is the third most popular cosmetic procedure by Asian Americans and the cosmetic procedure the most practiced in Asia.
Equipped with an understanding of this subject, at one point I stopped trying to blend in and joke. There is no humor in watching people like Julia Chen forced to change their look for a successful career or to see children grow up with trauma and insecurities about their appearance. Piece by piece, I went through a journey of self-acceptance, and today I am proud of my Asian roots and the very look that makes me unique.
The color of the skin, the shape of the eyes and the physical characteristics make people not only “sensitive” but vulnerable. All of the specific oppressions people of color have experienced in history make jokes about their bodies definitely funny.
Looking back on a trend is no exception.
Contact Sophie Wang at ‘sophie.my.wang’ at ‘gmail.com.